Best Marketing Analytics Tools 2021
You can have the most creative subway ads or TV commercials, but if you can’t track exactly how many eyeballs have landed on those ads or how they’ve impacted sales, you can’t really tell the effectiveness of those campaigns. To solve this problem, you need marketing analytics software.
Marketing analytics software collects data from various sources and channels and tells businesses how their marketing efforts are doing. In the ideal world, you want to make as much profit (if not more!) as your expenditure. With tools that measure your company’s marketing performance, you can then know how to better spend your marketing dollars and time.
What’s on This Page
Top 5 Rated Marketing Analytics Tools
SEMrush
Best for SEO and keyword analysis
SEMrush is the marketing analytics tool you need to track what keywords are bringing traffic to both you and your competitors. This software offers more than 50 tools and products, helping you do better in search engine optimization, content, social media, and market research. Not only does it show you a bunch of keywords you can use for your ad campaigns, but it also finds blog topics that might resonate with your audience. To make sure you’re making the most of your marketing dollars, SEMrush optimizes your advertising spend and tells you which content is bringing in revenue vs. costing you money. You can also see holistically how your competitors’ social media accounts are doing compared to yours.
SEMrush has been used by 7 million marketers, has seen over 41 trillion backlinks and 20 billion keywords. If you want to boost your online presence and appear higher in search results, then SEMrush is the tool you need!
Price:
- There are three pricing plans, with the cheapest one at $99 per month.
Overall Ratings:
StackCompare.com
4.75 (Aggregate Score)
Capterra.com
4.3 (1357 user reviews)
G2.com
4.5 (1176 user reviews)
HubSpot Marketing Hub
Best for content management and ad tracking
The HubSpot CRM platform is a one-stop shop for professional marketers, and its Marketing Hub software is especially valuable. Hubspot helps you create and publish content that your audience wants to see, exactly when they want to see it. Their ad management tool will track ads that are performing well and put more marketing dollars in them.
When it comes to converting leads, HubSpot has a sophisticated email marketing platform. There are design templates for your mobile-optimized email campaigns and HubSpot can help you run A/B tests as well as personalizing the email. Besides emails, HubSpot also makes it very easy for you to build landing pages and forms.
Data don’t make sense unless they’re put together in a report. HubSpot has powerful custom reporting and built-in analytics. Whatever your business needs are, you can select the data you want to analyze and share insights with your marketing executives. Plus, you can share your leads with the sales team through Salesforce so business deals happen faster.
Price:
- There are three pricing plans, with the cheapest one at $45 per month.
Overall Ratings:
StackCompare.com
4.63 (Aggregate Score)
Capterra.com
4.5 (4466 user reviews)
G2.com
4.4 (6756 user reviews)
BuzzSumo
Best for trending keywords and content topics
BuzzSumo is exactly the tool you need to boost your company’s digital content strategy. This software provides a comprehensive social media and content analysis dashboard that tells you which topics are trending (or, “buzzing”) on Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, and Twitter. It reads through millions of content a day so it can identify key influencers in your field and see how your company compares to them. Despite trends changing all the time, you can analyze data from a range of time periods — from 12 hours to 12 months.
To maximize the effectiveness of your marketing strategies, BuzzSumo offers advanced keyword search operators, content type filters, backlink information, and influencer marketing features. You can export this data to a spreadsheet-friendly format to analyze the data further and use the results as the base for future marketing activities.
Price:
- BuzzSumo offers a 30-day free trial then three tiers of service, with the cheapest one at $99 per month. Pro tip: You can save a lot if you go for the annual billing option.
Overall Ratings:
StackCompare.com
4.5 (Aggregate Score)
Capterra.com
4.5 (123 user reviews)
G2.com
4.5 (81 user reviews)
MailChimp
Best for managing email marketing campaigns
Mailchimp is great for building brand presence and engaging target customers through email marketing campaigns. First, it’ll help you get a custom domain to launch a website. Once your brand has got an online home, Mailchimp will help you build emails, social media ads, landing pages with their existing templates. That’s not it though — the software will also make sure you’re speaking to the right audience segment in order to make sure your marketing dollars are properly spent.
You can use the smart marketing tools on Mailchimp to automate your marketing strategies. For example, when they’ve bought something on your website, they’ll automatically receive a confirmation and thank you email.
Last but not least, Mailchimp collects data from engagement with your marketing content and recommends ways to help you do better in future campaigns. Wondering how many people have opened an email or clicked the “Buy” button? Mailchimp has got you covered.
Price:
- Mailchimp offers a free plan, but more sophisticated plans can go up to $299 a month.
Overall Ratings:
StackCompare.com
4.38 (Aggregate Score)
Capterra.com
4.5 (10000 user reviews)
G2.com
4.3 (11127 user reviews)
Tableau
Best for data analysis and reporting
Looking for software that can do all the analysis work for you? Meet Tableau. Tableau aims to provide all the marketing data you need to design campaigns. It can combine and visualize your data from spreadsheets and databases in minutes. The dashboard will show you trends and patterns in modern ways you may have never seen before! When you update your data, the dashboard will automatically update as well. Bonus feature? You can publish a dashboard with just a few clicks to share it live with your teammates.
Tableau is loved for having great flexibility when it comes to choosing data to analyze. The software also meets the toughest governance and security requirements, ensuring that your company’s data is safe with them.
Price:
- The cheapest plan comes at $70 per month, but you can also create your own bundle of products depending on company needs.
Overall Ratings:
StackCompare.com
4.5 (Aggregate Score)
Capterra.com
4.5 (1485 user reviews)
G2.com
4.4 (902 user reviews)
Our Rating Process
There are many ways — or “data points” — to measure a campaign’s success. Marketing analytics software gathers these data points, shows you patterns or trends, turns them into actionable insights, and eventually helps drive revenue. There are many different types of marketing analytics tools out there, but a good one should have at least four of the following capabilities:
Return on Investment (ROI)
Data Collection
Reports and Dashboards
Multichannel Tracking
Return on Investment (ROI)
You can calculate your return on investment (ROI) percentage by dividing your net profit by the cost of your marketing campaign and then multiplying that number by 100. For example, if you only spent $1,000 for a campaign but you made $10,000 in sales, then your ROI was 1,000%. This percentage is important because it tells you if the money you’re spending on marketing efforts is worth it. You can also use past ROI to persuade company executives when planning future marketing strategies.
Data Collection
You can’t run marketing analysis without data. How many customers saw your ads? How many actually clicked on them? How many ended up buying something? Did they tell their friends about the product? Data is key to collecting insights and driving marketing strategies.
Reports and Dashboards
Seeing data isn’t enough to know what steps to take next. Marketing analytics software that compiles reports and dashboards can help you visualize results over time. You’ll be able to see how your ice cream sales progressed from January to August, and what that tells you about customer behavior. With these insights, you can make more accurate predictions and hit marketing goals more easily in future campaigns.
Multichannel Tracking
Oftentimes, marketing efforts span across various channels: email, social media, SMS, landing pages, out-of-home (e.g. billboards, subways ads), and search engines. Some channels may perform better than others for a certain audience, which is why you need a marketing analytics tool that can tell you this information in order to better spend your marketing dollars.
With these criteria in mind, we’ve picked and assessed the five best marketing analytics tools for you. We scored them each out of five points to help you in your decision-making process.
Product Features
SEMrush
$99
/ month
- Free Trial
- 50+ Tools
- Content Optimization
HubSpot
$45
/ month
- Free Trial
- A/B Testing
- Integration
MailChimp
$299
/ month
- Email Analytics
- Social Media Ads
- A/B Testing
BuzzSumo
$99
/ month
- Content Optimization
- Free Trial
- Data Analysis
Alternative Options
Other Services
Frequently Asked Questions
What software do marketing analysts use?
There are many different types of marketing analytics software out there. Here are a few examples:
- Social media analytics software: This type of software tracks how people engage with content on social media in terms of likes, comments, and shares. These are key information to understanding customer desires.
- SEO software: This type of software analyzes how businesses are being ranked in search results. It can tell you trending keywords and content topics so you can use more fitting words to attract customers in campaigns.
- Content analytics software: Just like social media analytics, content analytics software measures page views, shares, outbound clicks, search rankings, and average time spent on blogs, articles, and on-demand webinars, etc. Sometimes, you can even discover trending content published by competitors on these types of software.
What type of analytics has the most value in marketing?
With so many different types of metrics available to marketers, it’s important to know which ones are the most important. Considering that marketers are spending lots of money on campaigns, the most worthy analytics should tell marketers which campaigns are bringing them the most return on investment (ROI). So for example, instead of looking at how many likes a post has received, it may be more important to see which post was the most effective in turning likes into sales. With that information, you can focus your marketing dollars on the right content.
Can I use Google Analytics for marketing?
Sure, Google Analytics is a free website analytics tool that allows you to track the traffic coming to your website and how much time people usually spend on your site. The tool itself is pretty basic, so if you want more comprehensive data, you might want to integrate other tools such as Google AdWords. Alternatively, Google Analytics also comes with a premium version that costs about $100,000 annually.